NO NO: A DOCKUMENTARY

In the hyper-charged powder keg of the late 1960s, Los Angeles native and Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis was ready to light the match. Proudly black, loudly opinionated, ready to rumble and almost always high on one substance or another, Dock was considered the Muhammad Ali of the ballpark.

He made history on June 12, 1970, when he pitched a no-hitter while completely flying on LSD. Flash forward a few years, and he is broke and essentially unemployable. But Dock Ellis was a born fighter, whether battling a racist society, the baseball establishment or his own demons.

There are a lot of colorful characters in the story of this larger-than-life figure, and filmmaker Jeffrey Radice corrals colleagues, ex-wives, journalists, managers, children, gadflies and protégés to produce a balanced biography of Ellis with the generosity of spirit the man himself embraced in the last few decades of his life. No No: A Dockumentary is a lot of things: sports movie, redemption narrative and portrait of an era, but at its core it is quintessentially Dock.

Embroidering this indelible character study is a fantastic hard psychedelic funk score by Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys.